The first year every state sent a woman to Congress, in one map

Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at Rutgers’s Center for American Women and Politics, says a combination of factors could make some states better at promoting women than others.

Frontier states led the way on women’s suffrage and were among the first to send women to Congress

Some of the earliest states to send women to Capitol Hill were both “frontier states” and among the first to approve women’s suffrage.

These places were likely more open to promoting women in roles outside domestic spaces, Dittmar says.

“We see some of the earliest women broadly out west, in part, because of the frontier culture and the reality that there weren’t as many men,” she notes. “There was a little more of people being accustomed to seeing women outside traditional domestic spheres.”